It has been claimed that bilingualism enhances inhibitory control, but the available evidence is equivocal. The authors evaluated several possible versions of the inhibition hypothesis by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals with regard to stop signal performance, inhibition of return, and the attentional blink. These three phenomena, it can be argued, tap into different aspects of inhibition. Monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in stop signal reaction time and thus were comparable in terms of active-inhibitory efficiency. However, bilinguals showed no facilitation from spatial cues, showed a strong inhibition of return effect, and exhibited a more pronounced attentional blink. These results suggest that bilinguals do not differ from monolinguals in terms of active inhibition but have acquired a better ability to maintain action goals and to use them to bias goal-related information. Under some circumstances, this ability may indirectly lead to more pronounced reactive inhibition of irrelevant information.

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This study examined the asymmetrical language switching cost in a word reading task (Experiment 1) and in a categorization task (Experiment 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, Spanish–English bilinguals named words in first language (L1) and second language (L2) in a switching paradigm. They were slower to switch from their weaker L2 to their more dominant L1 than from L1 to L2. In Experiment 2 and 3, high vs. low English proficiency bilinguals decided whether a word visually presented in their L1 or L2 referred to an animate or to an inanimate entity. In this case, bilinguals did not show asymmetrical cost when they switched between languages. These results suggest that inhibitory processes in bilingual processing as indexed by the asymmetrical language switching cost are only observed when L1 and L2 lexical representations compete for selection (e.g. word naming task). In addition, L2 proficiency did not influence the absence of asymmetrical switching cost.

In 3 experiments, we investigated the effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Participants were asked to judge whether 2 objects, whose names did or did not share grammatical gender, belonged to the same semantic category by pressing a key. Monolingual speakers of English (Experiment 1), Italian (Experiments 1 and 2), and Spanish (Experiments 2 and 3) were tested in their native language. Italian and Spanish participants responded faster to pairs of stimuli sharing the same gender, whereas no difference was observed for English participants. In Experiment 2, the pictures were chosen in such a way that the grammatical gender of the names was opposite in Italian and Spanish. Therefore, the same pair of stimuli gave rise to different patterns depending on the gender congruency of the names in the languages. In Experiment 3, Spanish speakers performed the same task under an articulatory suppression condition, showing no grammatical gender effect. The locus where meaning and gender interact can be located at the level of the lexical representation that specifies syntactic information: Nouns sharing the same grammatical gender activate each other, thus facilitating their processing and speeding up responses, either to semantically related pairs or to semantically unrelated pairs.

We explored whether the grammatical gender of the native language (L1) affects the production of words in a second language (L2). Evidence from previous studies is contrasting. In the present investigation, Italian-Spanish bilinguals were instructed to name pictures in L2 (Experiments 1 and 2) or to translate words from L1 to L2 (Experiment 3), producing either the bare noun or the noun phrase (article + noun). Half of the nouns had the same gender in the two languages, while the other half had a different gender. In all experiments, responses were faster in the gender-congruent than in the gender-incongruent condition, irrespective of task (L2 picture naming or forward word translation) and syntactic type (bare noun and noun phrase). We propose that in the bilingual system, parallel to the semantic route, a direct lexical, nonsemantic route connects the languages and that the native language interacts at the level of grammatical gender with the lexical representations of the response language.